Those Dreadful Attacks

It hardly bears thinking about. Five separate, brutal attacks on a despised class, defined by what they are forced to do to earn a living in Blair's Britain.

Whether the attacks are the work of one person or of many (a theory which shows how widespread in society is this hatred), the perpetrators are obviously deeply disturbed individuals, almost certainly confused about their sexuality, ill at ease and unable to come to terms with a modern Britain which has increasingly shown that old attitudes to what used to be called "the Daily Mail problem" are no longer relevant.

What do these self-appointed moral Tsars (and didn't Peter Sutcliffe claim to be "cleaning Bradford up" ?) think they will have achieved with their senseless assaults ? Like it or not, there have always been Daily Mail columnists - and, despite the best efforts of pursed-lipped, judgemental liberals, there probably always will be.

Poor Richard Littlejohn was merely trying to earn a living the best way he knows how. He doesn't deserve to be brutally attacked in this horrific manner, no matter what his lifestyle.

Were it not for all those 'aren't I liberal' people writing about the murdered girls as plucky little street heroines, he would not have been driven to write what he did.

Society is to blame. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone at a husband and father struggling to fill those column inches to buy Christmas gifts for his little ones.

He may be only a 'Daily Mail columnist', despised and disposable, to the curtain-twitching social worker brigade, but he's Daddy to those children, and we should never forget that in our rush to define him purely by what he does in order to put bread on the table and make those little children's eyes light up.

Which, I ask you, is the greater danger to society ? Mr Littlejohn's scribbles, which only harm himself, or the Archbishop of Canterbury's illegal war in Iraq ?